What are the odds that a Malaysian horror film that pays homage to Malaysia’s iconic female horror creature on screen from the ’50s, created by a Kerala-born Indian man, screens at the 28th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), in the Midnight Cinema segment alongside William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973)?
Thalassery-born filmmaker Balakrishna Narayan Rao was specially recruited to join Shaw Brothers’ Malay Film Productions. By 1957, he’d left to join rival Cathay-Keris Studio, where he began work on Pontianak. BN Rao’s Pontianak film series (Pontianak; Dendam Pontianak/Revenge of the Pontianak; Sumpah Pontianak/Curse of the Pontianak, 1957-58) has engendered generations of Malaysian and Indonesian horror films and filmmakers, including Amanda Nell Eu.
Before coming to India, Malaysian filmmaker Amanda Nell Eu’s debut feature Tiger Stripes garnered applause at its screening at prestigious American Film Institute’s 2023 AFI Fest in Los Angeles. “The female body,” as the American magazine Variety put it, “proves to be a source of horror in Amanda Nell Eu’s deliciously subversive Malaysian Oscar submission.” At the 2023 Cannes Film Festival’s International Critics’ Week, Tiger Stripes became Malaysia’s first film ever to win the Grand Jury prize for best feature.
A still from Amanda Nell Eu's 2024 Oscars-entry Malaysian horror film 'Tiger Stripes'.
Tiger Stripes marries body horror with a teenaged girl’s angst. Twelve-year-old Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizai), who lives in a small rural community in Malaysia, is a feisty, witty, vivacious pre-teen, the TikTok-like star of her friends’ circle in her all-girls school. No boys here, teenaged girls have enough problems of their own. “We don’t need to talk about boys, it’s also waste of time,” says Amanda, who puts things in her films to question them, like Othering, which schools thrive in. In one scene, a teacher comments on how Chinese kids are doing well and the Malaysian kids are just laid-back. Right there are sown detrimental seeds of jealousy and racism.
As the first girl in her class, when puberty strikes and she sees blood (menstruation), as her body begins to transform in “mysterious” ways (whiskers), and she’s distanced and bullied by even her friends, the unsettling othering, rejection, isolation/ loneliness making her hate her own body — what teenagers go through on the threshold of puberty — brings out the tiger-like monster in her, who runs away from mean humans into the solace of the jungle. Like a harassed tiger forced from its habitat, Zaffan chooses to reveal her genuine nature, expressing both fury and beauty. The organic, uninhibited fun, in the wake of socially-imposed fear, children find in the jungle, is captured in dollies, handheld and tracking shots by French cinematographer Jimmy Gimferrer, unlike the static world of the adult, which tries to exorcise the “ghost”.
Amanda has seen a handful of Indian films: 3 Idiots, RRR, Lunch Box, and Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, which is “a classic. We learn about cinema watching that,” she said in an exclusive interview to Moneycontrol during the recent AFI Fest 2023. Amanda talks about body horror and the female experience, tiger extinction and Malaysia’s censorship of the film. Edited excerpts:
Do you remember your reactions to watching horror films when you were young?
I remember when I was a kid, my then teenaged sisters, seven-eight years older than me, locked me in a room and made me watch the part in Child’s Play (1988) where Chucky the doll comes alive. I was a kid, so I was terrified. I threw away and destroyed all the dolls in my room. But it made me really love the horror genre, like a weird sadistic feeling of loving that fear, that imagination, of being terrified of Chucky because it creeps into your conscious and home. Only as an adult I realised that Child’s Play is a comedy film. From then on, I was watching so many types of horror films. At sleepovers at my friend’s house, we’d record on the VHS films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). We got a good thrashing when we got caught by her parents since we weren’t the right age for such films, but I became addicted to them.
How are Eastern horror films different from Western horror films? Were you also inspired by the Japanese Kaiju tradition and the Indonesian Joko Anwar films?
Definitely the Japanese horror was something that was so iconic to us and to the cinema world. Joko Anwar is definitely more recent. I love his work. He’s very good. But I think it was the Japanese horror that I thought was so incredible because of the monsters, you have this woman Ringu and you don’t even know why she’s doing those things. That clicked with me. I think Western horror films explain a lot of why things happen. That’s not the case with Eastern horror. You’ll have to watch the sequels and prequels and put it together. That’s so beautiful because it’s the same thing with the folklore we have, I’m sure in India as well, but in Malaysia and Southeast Asia, we have these folklores where sometimes we don’t even know why this creature or entity is doing evil. When I’m making films, I want to take all these things that we know and were so terrified of and question it. Maybe, it’s not actually evil and we were wrong the whole time.
Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu at the 2023 AFI Fest, Los Angeles. (Photo: Stephanie Cornfield)Is that character on the tree in Tiger Stripes from Malaysian mythology?
In Malaysian mythology, we have so many stories about creatures who live in the jungle, whether they live inside a tree or inside a waterfall. Even when we go for shoots in the jungle, it’s a very strict rule for all cast and crew to not pee or defecate in the jungle because you want to respect nature but also believe that there are beings, spirits who live there. So, that woman in the tree to me is inspired by these stories, by these spirits. I also wanted her to represent nature. To have this kind of being to show the lead character Zaffan what nature is. It’s feminine, large, strong, wild, beautiful and ferocious. And you have to question whether you can face her or not because she, like nature, is not doing anything to you. We are the ones poking and destroying the jungles, causing havoc to them.
Was Pontianak, in the Malaysian horror genre, your inspiration for that creature?
Yeah, so actually, I guess the pioneer for me really comes from the old Pontianak films from the 1950s. I might be wrong but I think you can only watch Part 2 or Part 3 because Part 1 of the trilogy is missing, there was this drama where the director’s wife threw it away or something like that. All these old films have a lot of drama behind it. (Laughs) It was so cool to have such an iconic monster in our culture. Pontianak is probably like the No. 1 folklore creature that we have in our folk tales. And to see her on screen in black and white from the ’50s means that she’s been living on the silver screen for many, many years. That to me was a big inspiration. It was amazing to look at like these kind of old films from Malaya, at the time, it was very much multicultural in terms of who was telling the stories. The director (of Pontianak, 1957) is actually from India as well and he was called BN Rao (B Narayan Rao).
A still from BN Rao's Pontianak (1957)
We make a lot of horror films in Malaysia. They do very well domestically at the box office. In the past five years, there is a horror film called Roh (2019 folk horror film by Emir Ezwan) which I really like. But in general, the ones that a lot of people love, typical horror tropes, are fun but doesn’t scare me…my metre of horror is broken. I’m so over jump scares, that is so boring.
You also break the horror genre by bringing in comedy in the film, to show as if they are two sides of the same coin.
Yes, exactly. If you are able to love horror and also want to make horror, you definitely have a sense of humour, because it is dark and twisted and you’re literally talking about a lot of things that people fear. I think comedy is the same. You can get very dark with comedy. You are talking about people’s fears and insecurities with comedy, you can have punch lines and jokes. In horror, too, you build up tension, build up all this expectation and then have that punch line or joke at the end. When I make my films, they’re not meant to be all out horror films, not meant to be scary. I don’t want to jump-scare you or make you terrified. I want you to have fun because that’s how I love horror now.
So, the comical character of the exorcist, which is a parody on political leaders, religious leaders, blind faith, godmen, and patriarchal men wanting to tame ‘wild’ women, is again you having fun in the film?
Yes to all that. (Laughs) I’m using very real kind of characters that we have on the internet in Malaysia and Indonesia, where to me it’s bizarre and comedy. I’m coming from the city, so I have all my privilege laughing at these people and laughing at that belief but I respect people who believe that, who follow it. But I also wanted to comment on and question it. We all need to question things and think critically. We all need to look at where these people are coming from or what they’re really saying. That was what I wanted to play with but also have so much fun, this character is fun and charming. You could be enticed by him.
What scares you?
Humans, society, the world. Look at how disgusting and horrible the world is, and how we openly just kill each other. That is terrifying. Ghosts and monsters can be my friends. They don’t do anything; they are so innocent. But humans are the most disgusting things.
Tell us about your love affair with the body horror subgenre.
I love body horror. Of course, we can’t ignore (David) Cronenberg, which was really where my knowledge of body horror started, of him playing with this idea of body and technology, what’s natural and what’s unnatural, that was just messed up. I remember watching it and finding it quite interesting that you can make the body a very terrifying thing. That was when I was younger. When I grew older, I realised the body is a terrifying thing because society teaches us to be afraid of it. In particular, as a woman, to hate your own body, to not even want to look at it. I found my sense of humour there. To push that idea further. Then you start seeing a lot of female artists and filmmakers who are also playing on this idea. Everyone talks of Julia Ducournau in reference to my film, but she opened the doors to an audience to accept this.
Did Tiger Stripes stem from your short film It’s Easier to Raise Cattle (2017)?
I call it like a Marvel Cinematic Universe, my cinematic universe (laughs). It’s Easier to Raise Cattle was 100 per cent about a Pontianak. And I’m playing on like friendship and love and female friendship and then how much we have this sisterhood and how we’ll always be there for each other. So yeah, Tiger Stripes is really kind of a springboard from that. I just love making films that are dealing with female experiences, dealing with the female body, playing with folklore, playing with genre.
A screen grab from Amanda's 2017 short film 'It’s Easier to Raise Cattle'.
There has been a history of witch-hunting and labelling and calling opinionated women names.
Yeah, we’re all labelled as some kind of hideous monster, whatever it is. Even if you breathe wrong, there must be something wrong with you. But things are changing in the landscape. I mean, that’s amazing to see. It’s not enough, but I feel the more diversity we have behind the camera, as in the storytellers, so, move away guys, let us tell our fears, let us tell them with our gaze, how we see things and so many things. And I also love like playing on that idea of like, let’s say, in the Western world they have witches, but in my world, there’s Pontianak or whatever. I’m going to take that and I’m going to now empower it. I’m going to use that word, like the word bitch or the word slut…horrible words that people use on us, I’m going to take it and show you what it is and it’s awesome and you are so wrong about everything.
It’s amazing how you bookend the film with an electrifying TikTok-like dance of your protagonist. Is she a TikTok sensation?
No, she’s not. I think most kids at that age know how to dance. Most kids these days are very good dancers and she made up the dance. Zafreen trains in traditional dancing. She’s also a brilliant martial artist, training to be in Malaysia’s national team. She’s a badass girl. So, that song is a Dangdut song, a popular ’90s music genre from Indonesia, by this band called Lolita. I’ve always wanted to put it in a film.
What was your idea behind putting these dances in vertical mobile phone frames unlike the rest of the film?
The rest of the film is shot on the typical 1:86 standard cinema frame. Vertical screen is how all kids look at screens now, take photos, etc. It’s something you can’t ignore. I wanted to play with that because that is also part of their gaze, how they see and learn things.
How much of the animation was done on the computer and how much were practical effects?
I wanted to do everything in a very DIY style. So, mostly practical effects and just cleaning wires or cleaning up. Even the effects were like 90-95 per cent on camera, from the (monster) makeup to like how she climbs trees or moves about, I just love that old style. I wanted to pay homage to those old black and white horror films where there were no computer effects. I wanted to have that kitschy, bizarre feeling. Those images are very much Malaysian folklore. From the poster to how she looks, she had to look gnarly, weird, kitschy, because our monsters are like that.
A still from Amanda Nell Eu's film 'Tiger Stripes'.
Talk about the jungle and tiger symbology. How intrinsic is the jungle and tiger to the Malay life?
The jungle, if you look at it historically and in our folk tales, was respected. We eat, hunt, use medicines from the jungle. We also tell stories from the jungle. But now in the modern days…I’m from Kuala Lumpur, so it’s a concrete jungle. The jungles are getting increasingly destroyed. I find that very interesting and strange that it’s in our culture to respect the jungle but the modern world doesn’t care. It wants money and to do everything cheap, it wants palm oil and wants to kill everything, throw whatever is not useful to us. I find that so painful. Going back to Tiger Stripes, that’s exactly what I wanted to play with, to use the animal as the tiger to talk about how we love and respect the tiger, beautiful and majestic, and also that the tigers are getting extinct in Malaysia. Tiger is such an important animal in Malaysia. It’s a big deal. It’s in our national emblem. Our football team is called Tigers (officially nicknamed Harimau Malaya or Malayan tiger). It’s painful that they are dying, are close to extinction.
I wanted to play with it and move the narrative to something genderless, something more animal, more about power, about self-empowerment.
A still from 'Tiger Stripes'.
The Malaysian censor board came down heavily on the film. What all has been cut?
I can’t tell the exact number of cuts but it’s a lot. Yes, there are horror elements but the whole film is really about being a young girl who is quite free and curious, the natural things that a lot of young teenage girls do, that part was removed. The most beautiful, innocent part.
It was very painful to do the theatrical run in Malaysia of the cut version and so that’s why I had to make a public statement to tell the audience, who are paying for the tickets to watch the film, that the theatrical run is not my film. It is not the film that won in Cannes or has been submitted to the Oscars.
I made this film, in the first place, to show why the character Zaffan still needs to fight for her space, fight to be herself. It’s very frustrating, but as women we still are not allowed to fully be ourselves because we need to behave a certain way and not reveal our hearts and souls too much. I’m the kind of person who reveals everything and that’s why I make films, to show you my heart. It (the censorship) has only strengthened my resolve to keep telling these stories, fighting for our space and for my voice.
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